Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Why do they hate us?

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - A Guantanamo Bay prisoner slashed his throat with a sharpened fingernail last month, spilling a lot of blood but surviving, a U.S. military commander said Tuesday.

Guards administered first aid and took the prisoner to the prison clinic, said navy Cmdr. Andrew Haynes, the deputy commander in charge of the guard force.

"There was an impressive effusion of blood," Haynes told reporters visiting the base. He would not disclose the man's name or nationality. A medical officer, who could not be identified under military rules for journalists, said the prisoner received several stitches and spent a week under psychiatric observation.

There have been four suicides since the United States opened the military prison at Guantanamo in January 2002 for men suspected of involvement in terrorism or links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

Haynes said he doubted the latest incident was a real suicide attempt, and characterized it instead as an act of "self-harm."

The incident occurred while the man was taking his daily five-minute shower in early November, around the time when more than two dozen journalists were visiting Guantanamo for a military court hearing.

Haynes said there have been up to half-dozen "self-harm incidents" in the two months he has been assigned to Guantanamo Bay. He described suicide as a "paramount tactic" used by prisoners to discredit U.S. forces. But defence lawyers and human rights groups say the suicides are a result of the prisoners' despair.

Many of the 305 men held at Guantanamo have been there for more than five years without charge. The military has said it plans to prosecute up to 80 of the prisoners.

In other developments, a Guantanamo prison manual from 2004 that was posted anonymously on the Internet on Tuesday indicated that some detainees were prevented from having any contact with representatives from the International Committee of the Red Cross. The military said it could not immediately confirm the document's authenticity.

Commander Haynes said there had been four to six occurrences in the last two months in which detainees harmed themselves, a rate that he said was consistent with recent experience. Those instances show that a potentially deadly struggle between detainees and their jailers continues, largely out of public view. One detainee committed suicide in May, after three other suicides the previous June, and there have also been numerous suicide attempts.

...

In interviews with reporters Tuesday, officials said nine detainees remained on hunger strikes and were being force-fed daily. The detainee engaged in the longest of the hunger strikes, the officials said, has been force-fed for 816 days.